Mapeamento de ontologias empresariais para modelos de processos de negócio em BPMN, com aplicação em processos de software

Pós-graduação em Ciência da Computação - IBILCE

Apoio à execução de experimentos controlados usando uma ontologia para empacotamento: a ferramenta OntoExpTool

Pós-graduação em Ciência da Computação - IBILCE

Acute phase proteins as markers of infectious diseases in small animals

During the acute phase response, there is an increased production and release of certain proteins known as acute phase proteins (APPs) which can be produced by hepatocytes and peripheral tissues such as C-reactive protein (CRP), serum amyloid A (SAA), haptoglobin (Hp), alpha-1 acid glycoprotein (AGP). These proteins have been investigated as markers of various infectious diseases in small animals and the purpose of this review is to update the current knowledge about APPs in infectious diseases in dogs and cats.

Changes in the phytoplankton structure downstream a large reservoir: effects of tributaries on the assemblages attributes

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Four types of evidentiality in the native languages of Brazil

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Atrazine levels in the Jaboticabal water stream (Sao Paulo State, Brazil) and its toxicological effects on the pacu fish Piaractus mesopotamicus

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Biological and molecular characterization of a Trypanosoma cruzi isolate obtained from Panstrongylus megistus captured in Sao Paulo State, Brazil

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Maximal Oxygen uptake cannot be determined in the incremental phase of the lactate minimum test on a cycle ergometer

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

SOAP processing performance and enhancement

The web services (WS) technology provides a comprehensive solution for representing, discovering, and invoking services in a wide variety of environments, including Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and grid computing systems. At the core of WS technology lie a number of XML-based standards, such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), that have successfully ensured WS extensibility, transparency, and interoperability. Nonetheless, there is an increasing demand to enhance WS performance, which is severely impaired by XML's verbosity. SOAP communications produce considerable network traffic, making them unfit for distributed, loosely coupled, and heterogeneous computing environments such as the open Internet. Also, they introduce higher latency and processing delays than other technologies, like Java RMI and CORBA. WS research has recently focused on SOAP performance enhancement. Many approaches build on the observation that SOAP message exchange usually involves highly similar messages (those created by the same implementation usually have the same structure, and those sent from a server to multiple clients tend to show similarities in structure and content). Similarity evaluation and differential encoding have thus emerged as SOAP performance enhancement techniques. The main idea is to identify the common parts of SOAP messages, to be processed only once, avoiding a large amount of overhead. Other approaches investigate nontraditional processor architectures, including micro-and macrolevel parallel processing solutions, so as to further increase the processing rates of SOAP/XML software toolkits. This survey paper provides a concise, yet comprehensive review of the research efforts aimed at SOAP performance enhancement. A unified view of the problem is provided, covering almost every phase of SOAP processing, ranging over message parsing, serialization, deserialization, compression, multicasting, security evaluation, and data/instruction-level processing.

A model and an algebra for semi-structured and full-text queries

The need for a convergence between semi-structured data management and Information Retrieval techniques is manifest to the scientific community. In order to fulfil this growing request, W3C has recently proposed XQuery Full Text, an IR-oriented extension of XQuery. However, the issue of query optimization requires the study of important properties like query equivalence and containment; to this aim, a formal representation of document and queries is needed. The goal of this thesis is to establish such formal background. We define a data model for XML documents and propose an algebra able to represent most of XQuery Full-Text expressions. We show how an XQuery Full-Text expression can be translated into an algebraic expression and how an algebraic expression can be optimized.

Data and behavioral contracts for web services

The recent trend in Web services is fostering a computing scenario where loosely coupled parties interact in a distributed and dynamic environment. Such interactions are sequences of xml messages and in order to assemble parties – either statically or dynamically – it is important to verify that the “contracts” of the parties are “compatible”. The Web Service Description Language (wsdl) is a standard used for describing one-way (asynchronous) and request/response (synchronous) interactions. Web Service Conversation Language extends wscl contracts by allowing the description of arbitrary, possibly cyclic sequences of exchanged messages between communicating parties. Unfortunately, neither wsdl nor wscl can effectively define a notion of compatibility, for the very simple reason that they do not provide any formal characterization of their contract languages. We define two contract languages for Web services. The first one is a data contract language and allow us to describe a Web service in terms of messages (xml documents) that can be sent or received. The second one is a behavioral contract language and allow us to give an abstract definition of the Web service conversation protocol. Both these languages are equipped with a sort of “sub-typing” relation and, therefore, they are suitable to be used for querying Web services repositories. In particular a query for a service compatible with a given contract may safely return services with “greater” contract.

A tuple space implementation for large-scale infrastructures

Coordinating activities in a distributed system is an open research topic. Several models have been proposed to achieve this purpose such as message passing, publish/subscribe, workflows or tuple spaces. We have focused on the latter model, trying to overcome some of its disadvantages. In particular we have applied spatial database techniques to tuple spaces in order to increase their performance when handling a large number of tuples. Moreover, we have studied how structured peer to peer approaches can be applied to better distribute tuples on large networks. Using some of these result, we have developed a tuple space implementation for the Globus Toolkit that can be used by Grid applications as a coordination service. The development of such a service has been quite challenging due to the limitations imposed by XML serialization that have heavily influenced its design. Nevertheless, we were able to complete its implementation and use it to implement two different types of test applications: a completely parallelizable one and a plasma simulation that is not completely parallelizable. Using this last application we have compared the performance of our service against MPI. Finally, we have developed and tested a simple workflow in order to show the versatility of our service.

Una implementazione della Logica Defeasible Temporale per il ragionamento giuridico

La presente tesi descrive l’implementazione in Java di un algoritmo per il ragionamento giuridico che cattura due sue importanti peculiarità: la defeasibility del ragionamento normativo e il concetto di tempo. “Defeasible” significa “ritrattabile” e sta ad indicare, appunto, quegli schemi di ragionamento nei quali è possibile rivedere o ritrattare le conclusioni tratte precedentemente. Il tempo è essenziale per un’accurata rappresentazione degli scenari presenti nel mondo reale e in particolare per gli scenari giuridici. I profili temporali delle norme sono essenzialmente due: (i) tempo esterno della norma, cioè il periodo durante il quale la norma è valida cioè appartiene al sistema giuridico; (ii) tempo interno della norma che fa riferimento al periodo in cui la norma si applica. In particolare quest’ultimo periodo di tempo coincide con il periodo in cui le condizioni presenti nella norma devono presentarsi affinché essa produca i suoi effetti. Inoltre, nella tesi viene presentata un’estensione della logica defeasible in grado di distinguere tra regole con effetti persistenti, che valgono non solo per l’istante in cui si verificano le premesse ma anche per ogni istante successivo, e regole con effetti transitori, che valgono per un singolo istante. L’algoritmo presentato in questa tesi presenta una complessità lineare nelle dimensioni della teoria in ingresso e può interagire con le applicazioni del web semantico poiché elabora teorie scritte in Rule-ML, un linguaggio basato su XML per la rappresentazione di regole.